The girl I briefly dated, Nancy, and her older sister, Debbie, lived with their mom and much older brother in an apartment about a block away from us. Whereas Ann and I kept mom's apartment clean and tidy since we weren't forced to do it, Nancy's family was, to say the least, disheveled. Nobody seemed to do dishes or kept house or cleaned. Their mom, like ours, worked many hours. Once in a while Debbie would become frustrated and clean up after the rest of the family, but otherwise their entire apartment looked like an unruly child's bedroom.
Besides the fact that I liked spending time with them, their family loved music and had vinyl 45's all over the place. I gained an appreciation of any number of artists with whom I had no familiarity. But at the beginning of 1964, everyone of us came to know the Beatles. Richard Watson's parents had a huge stereo console, made of beautiful, polished wood. It played remarkable sounds. And, of course, Richard immediately bought MEET THE BEATLES and then THE BEATLES SECOND ALBUM. I watched the Beatles appearances on the Ed Sullivan show, as well.
The youth music scene suddenly exploded, especially for me. My dad may have had Broadway cast recordings (THE MUSIC MAN) or a Frank Sinatra (COME FLY WITH ME) or Gordon MacRae (SEASONS OF LOVE) or Dinah Shore (DINAH! YES, INDEED) album, but he never had anything like the Beatles. Elvis was for the generation before ours, as were so many of the teen idols of the early 60's. We had Bobby Rydell's "Forget Him" on a single. However, the media revolution that the Beatles fostered was rock and roll albums filled with remarkable pop music. Adults might have wanted to own albums by those artists previously mentioned, and mom was more than happy to buy me a copy of my favorite artist's new album at the time, Peggy Lee's LATIN A' LA LEE, because that was their music. But I don't think that any of us at South Gate Junior High felt there was as much going on until the Beatles blew the lid off of everything that had come before.
And not only the Beatles, but we were hearing stuff that was equally as magical from Motown. I was actually thrilled with songs like Mary Wells' "My Guy" which helped bump the Beatles from their lock on the number one spot on the U.S. charts. LA radio stations such as KRLA and KHJ were our radio stations, playing our music. On TV were local dance shows such as Lloyd Thaxton's Hop and KHJ disc jockey Sam Riddle's 9th Street West. I actually went on Sam Riddle's show twice with Nancy.
After we moved to 8940 Cypress, I got invited to parties in the neighborhood where we played spin the bottle and kids actually made out to 45's being played on a portable stereo. The house next to ours, which was torn down and replaced by a two-story apartment house, was owned by a very old woman who had come from Germany many years before. She brought out a LIFE or LOOK magazine one day when I was in the yard, to show me a photo spread of The Beatles. I was surprised when she told me that she thought they were marvelous.
From 1964 forward, music became an even more important part of my life, whereas before it had always been something in the background, something that you might listen to but not with such an abiding passion and commitment.
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